View from Wire – A Privacy Tech Start-Up

Not only the address is cool: Rosenthaler Str 40 in Berlin, 6th floor overlooking Hackesche Markt. The product is just as cool: At secure privacy-enhancing messaging and ‘skype’ app called WIRE – free and user-friendly.

For Wire, privacy was a journey.

“We are two years old and we started as a messenger app not especially focused on privacy. But then we researched to market and found out that there was a spot for a secure messaging app,” said Siim Teller Head of Marketing at Wire. “So, in March we launched end-to-end encryption and open source apps and crypto protocol. In 2017, our servers will be open source too, so we are fully open source and our goal is to keep meta data for maximum 72 hours.”

Wire is a secure alternative to Skype and Facebook Messenger and even though WhatsApp also claims to have end-to-end encryption, it is Facebook-owned, it does collect metadata and it wants to give all user phone numbers to Facebook. The few data, Wire collects, stay on servers within the EU.

The biggest investor in Wire is the Danish Janus Friis, who co-invented Skype. There are 50 employees squattered over Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the UK, and its headquarter is in Switzerland, where many other privacy tech start-ups reside. The Berlin-office with amazing views over Berlin’s roofs, tv-tower and Hackesche Markt is by far the largest and where the development is going on.

The start-up will decide on a business model and how to generate revenue next year, and one idea is to become a secure Slack, so businesses and authorities can use it as a secure communication tool.